Responsible by design cornerstone of AI-first strategy: Balakrishna D R

Information technology (IT) giant Infosys has adopted an artificial intelligence (AI)-first strategy that embeds the technology in all offerings of the company. BALAKRISHNA D R, executive vice-president and global head of AI, automation and ECS at Infosys, spoke with Ayushman Baruah about AI and its responsible use. Edited excerpts from an e-mail interview.

Where is Infosys in its AI-first journey?
 

We have already embedded state-of-the-art AI in all our service offerings and platforms, apart from creating specialised AI solutions. We have reimagined and augmented the entire spectrum of digital offerings using AI. In application development, we are using generative AI (GenAI) for code generation, test case generation, and documentation generation. In IT infrastructure maintenance, we are using AI-powered operations like predictive maintenance. In legacy modernisation, AI is enabling us in code translation, impact analysis. We have reimagined the fundamentals of work, workplace, and workforce with AI.

What has Infosys done to ensure it adheres to ethical AI norms?
 

Infosys is committed to ensuring its AI solutions are ethical, transparent, and fair. We have technical systems, frameworks, and tools to ensure ethical, bias-free, explainable AI development, deployment, and use. Infosys adheres to and enables enterprises to comply with data privacy regulations and best practices, allowing businesses to protect sensitive data using secure and explainable AI. In the context of GenAI, there are multiple concerns like IP, privacy violations, toxicity, hallucination, security issues with AI. To ensure a fair, transparent, and safe AI system, Infosys has built technical and regulatory guardrails. ‘Responsible by design’ is one of the cornerstones of our AI-first approach. To implement this, we have enhanced our existing frameworks to cover AI-specific critical areas. We have created dedicated offerings for customers to adopt Responsible AI across the enterprise.
 

Customers are increasingly becoming aware of the need of AI systems to function responsibly and ethically.
 

How has the adoption of your AI offering Topaz been so far and which sectors are the quickest?
 

Infosys Topaz has been a phenomenal success, and we are witnessing a tremendous pace of adoption. We can attribute this primarily to the fact that Infosys Topaz caters to a wide range of specialised needs and differentiated solutions, leveraging the advantage of over 12,000 AI assets, 150 pre-trained AI models, 10 AI platforms, steered by AI-first specialists and data strategists. These have been developed based on our combined experience of walking our own AI-first journey and working on some of the most challenging industry problems with our customers for quite some time now. According to the Infosys Data+AI Radar, the financial services industry has the highest rate of adoption and is reaping a lot of benefits across all dimensions of AI use. It is closely followed by the retail, healthcare and automotive industries. We are seeing an interesting trend of rapid democratisation across all industries. Functions like contact centres, customer services, planning and operations are the fastest adopters.
 

How are you skilling employees in AI?
 

At Infosys, the AI-first approach includes our talent strategy as an important pillar, with focus on three levels of enablement and upskilling. Level 1 is called AI Aware, wherein we are working on making everyone aware of GenAI technologies and how AI assistants can help them be more productive. Level 2 refers to AI builders who can reimagine experience and processes to build industry-specific AI-led solutions. Level 3 refers to masters who understand the under-the-hood workings of ML (machine learning), DL (deep learning) and LLMs (large language models).
 

We have trained over 40,000 people on various AI technologies, and we plan to train more employees over the next 6 months.
 

Do you think AI will take away jobs or complement the human workforce? 
 

Rather than viewing AI as a competitor, we should embrace it. At Infosys, we believe in Human + AI and not Human versus AI. AI will reshape and redefine jobs and our ways of working, creating new opportunities. Historically, technological advancements have consistently led to creation of new jobs and industries.
 

AI will be no exception. The shift in requirements will allow us to tap into our unique qualities.